Archive > Vol. 21 no. 2

Roger Greenwald

Somewhere You Are Reading

Somewhere you are reading a poet I don’t know yet,
who might be a Syrian, a Pole or a Romanian,
somewhere you are turning pages, turning heads,
turning your head to tell me
the delights of the poems you’re reading
but I’m not there. Somewhere you’re reading
in English French or Arabic,
Hebrew Spanish Yiddish Greek,
it’s morning and you’re dipping a croissant in milky coffee
or eating airy buttered bread with chocolate sprinkles,
it’s afternoon and your biscotto slowly travels
from a glass of vino bianco to your lips,
and you would tell me of the poems
in Italian or Malayalam
that you’re reading now
if I were there
but I’m not there and you’re not here
and anyway, who are you?

 Somewhere you are reading Ivanescu or Róžycki,
Al-Maghout or Wei Ying-wu,
Margolin, Ravikovitch, Sutzkever or Stephen Berg,
you’re reading Tarjei Vesaas and can even pronounce him,
you’re glancing up from the lakeshore
and looking at me in silence
and your eyes say there’s no boundary anymore.

Somewhere you are reading, you’ve been reading,
you were reading poems I would have liked to know about
and somewhere I was reading poems
I would have liked to give you.
But who are you? And where was somewhere?